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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Steal This Book!, May 21, 2003
This review is from: To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (Hardcover)
Forty years ago, when I was squandering my education as a Harvard undergraduate, Bernard Bailyn was a rising star in that university's history department faculty. His immediate predecessor as the dean of Harvard's American studies scholars had been Perry Miller, an intellectual historian who, before his death in 1963, remade the study of American colonial history with his analyses of Puritan ideas gleaned largely from sermons. Indeed, American history and literature, on that campus at that time, was pretty much devoted to the study of big ideas, and not to the study of political, economic, or social events or movements or of artistic form. Bailyn was one of a new generation of historians who sought out ship registers, merchant's accounting ledgers, estate inventories, and other quantifiable data series, previously ignored, to tell their stories of how, in the late colonial and early national periods, ordinary Americans made decisions of lasting significance. For the next 30 years the study of American history followed Bailyn's lead. Still, Bailyn himself never fully abandoned his grounding in intellectual history. His oeuvre, for example, includes the highly respected "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" and a study of pamphleteering in the revolutionary period. With "To Begin the World Anew," Bailyn offers students of American history a thin book consisting of five essays reworked from speeches which he has given over several years. The essays are surely well-written, but they break no new ground. Readers who favor intellectual history may find them interesting enough. Readers who favor quantitative historical analysis will find them lacking. Thus, for example, taking his cue from an essay by art historian Kenneth Clark, Bailyn writes that Jefferson, Franklin, and the other American "founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it -- comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations. . . . For many -- the ablest, best informed, and most ambitious -- the result was a degree of rootlessness, of alienation either from the higher sources of culture or from the familiar local environment. . . . But the effect of their provincialism ran deeper than that. As their identity as a separate people took form through the Revolutionary years they came to see that their remoteness from the metropolitan world gave them a moral advantage in politics." (31-34) I enjoyed Bailyn's discussion and photographs of revolutionary era mansions and portraiture, in England and America, which he uses to illustrate this point. For my taste, however, his concepts of "provincialism," "rootlessness," "alienation," and "moral advantage" (like his concepts of "realism" and "idealism" in foreign policy) are too amorphous, and the analysis too formulaic, to much rely upon. I am undoubtedly still squandering that education, but I would suggest borrowing, and not buying, this book. Robert E. Olsen
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Holograph of Cultural Complexity, June 20, 2003
This review is from: To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (Hardcover)
Historical research of the highest quality is frequently driven by a determination to answer questions of compelling importance. That is especially true of this volume in which Bailyn offers five separate but related essays which, together, examine a theme which its subtitle suggests: the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders." In his Preface, Bailyn identifies two convictions which remain constant throughout all five chapters: that those founders were "truly creative people, and that their creative efforts, the generation-long enterprise that elevated these obscure people from their marginal world to the center of Western civilization, were full of inconsistencies, logical dilemmas, and unresolved problems." With regard to questions of compelling importance, several can be summarized as follows: 1. Which ambiguities "beset" Jefferson's career? What were their nature and impact? 2. What is revealed by the "strange interplay between lofty idealism and cunning realism in Franklin's spectacular success in Paris"? Meanwhile, what can be learned from the interplay between Franklin and Adams? 3. What is the significance of the fact that the authors of the Federalist papers struggled to reconcile "the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought"? To what extent was such a reconciliation achieved? These are indeed compelling questions, ones which probably need to be asked today as our nation struggles to decide what its appropriate role is in the global community. After I read this book but before I began to formulate this review, I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. In it, Stiglitz offers a heartfelt but rigorous examination of globalization, "the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies," asserting that it can and should be a force for good "and that it has the potential [in italics] to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor." However, given how globalization has been managed thus far, it should be rethought. Focusing primarily on the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) during the past decade, Stiglitz responds to the basic question: "Why has globalization -- a force that has brought so much good -- become so controversial?" I had Stiglitz's book in mind as I re-read Bailyn's. Granted, no one knew in the late-eighteenth century that the coalition of thirteen colonies (if it achieved independence) would one day become the single most powerful nation in the world. For me, the single greatest benefit of Bailyn's is his analysis of the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders," how they created a foundation on which the original thirteen colonies evolved over more than two centuries into the 50 states and their federal government which now, during arguably the most volatile period since the 1770s, struggles to the support the natural rights of humanity by advocating and supporting what Jefferson once referred to as "the sacred fire of freedom and self-government" throughout the world. Challenges of various kinds will, of course, continue to present themselves. Bailyn duly acknowledges that reality while suggesting that "I think an equally important challenge is our own responsibility to probe the character of our constitutional establishment, as the eighteenth century provincials probed the establishment they faced, to recognize that for many in our own time and within our own culture, it has become scholastic in nits elaboration, self-absorbed, self-centered, and in significant ways distant from the ordinary facts of life." Bailyn's brilliant examination of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders" is in essence an examination of the heritage of those founders, revealing the humanity of their talents and imperfections, to be sure, but also suggesting the standards of measurement by which we determine the extent to which we have proven worthy of that heritage.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
not a classic, but solid, April 25, 2004
While not groundbreaking or monumental, To Begin the World Anew is still a nice little book that offers some keen insights into the American Revolution, particularly at Bailyn's familiar level of ideas. Perhaps better than any other living historian (at least that I've read), Bailyn is particularly good at fleshing out themes. If there's a single historical theme to this work, it's the contrast, and sometimes competition, between idealism and realism, between the lofty ideas that animated the Revolution and putting them into practice in a way that works. The theme of the book, however, Bailyn's reason for writing it is to encourage a continued examination of the nation's founding. Bailyn opens with an essay on provincialism. America, he argues, was a provincial backwater, distant from more cosmopolitan Europe but still somewhat connected to continental culture. Hence, America was more receptive to experimental and new political ideas. Bailyn uses, to wonderful effect, the homes of the period as well as portraits to highlight these contrasts between Americans and Europeans. From there, Bailyn offers two essays: one on Jefferson and the other on Franklin. In both, the idealism-realism dichotomy is present. For Jefferson, it is in the sphere of domestic politics and institutions (and, indeed, within his very character). Bailyn uses Franklin to show how it played out in foreign policy; he also includes European portrayals of Franklin in art to show how he was received there. The fourth essay is on The Federalist, about the context of its writing by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay and particularly about how the papers have been used over the centuries by the Supreme Court--ever increasingly, as it turns out. (The essay on the same topic in Bailyn's Faces of Revolution is much better.) The final essay completes the trajectory of the book; where things began with American provincialism, they end with American constitutionalism and related ideas fanning out into Europe (and Latin America). While this last essay gives the book a nice sense of closure, it is the weakest of the lot and does little beyond drop the names of Europeans who were writing about American political ideas and adopting--or trying to--them in their native countries. Overall, this is a solid collection of essays that contributed to my understanding of the period. It is a worthwhile read.
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